When The Nue Cries
by Enyalie
Summary: Good clean action-y fun! Hollows! Shinigami! Mysterious plots! There will be blood! Ichi and Renji! Not like that, you dirty thing! There may even be some drama and angst and possibly a touch of canon romance.
1. Intro

In the last silent hours of the night, daylight was a hazy memory. Or, at least it was to the few still awake. The sleeping and dead have memories that care little of hours, if they have memories at all. But in any case the wakefulness of a few was a small concern; even those capable of seeing were unlikely to get around to looking.

The shadow slipped through the dark like a current through water.

It darted across rooftops, skimmed along roads, sailed over fences. It leapt along the bank of a river, coasted down an alley and as an afterthought, hurdled a parked truck. No one saw. No one looked.

The shadow stopped.

It stood in the street. It regarded a house. It narrowed its eyes. This should not be surprising. More shadows than you would like to think about by yourself in a dimly lit room have them, you know. This one, while not perhaps quite human, wasn't any more terrifying than your average tattooed, swordwielding punk.

It was a tattooed, swordwielding punk. He might have insisted upon _highly skilled_ tattooed, swordwielding punk, and his lack of modesty would not have made him a liar. You could see it in his easy stance, his sure step- a certain quality of movement bred into his bones. One would probably call it feline grace, yet feel underneath that the description wasn't quite right. One of keen perception would nix the "feline" for "simian" and be far more correct.

He regarded the house. It did not regard him back. A thought crossed his mind. It was this:

_Wonder how the brat's doing..._

A slow predatory smile snaked across his features, and one might have thought that fangs glinted behind it.

--

Just a quick taste.  
Quick, tell me who my literary influences are.


	2. Palaver

--

_The echoes of inhuman shrieks licked at the edges of hearing; strange voices like howling wind and the rush of flooding water, the cry of the storm that is everything angry and destructive in the world._

_So there were more._

_Ichigo spun, cursing, in time to dodge another wickedly curved claw and relieve its owner of the burden. But they just seemed to keep coming, not one following another, but all at once; dogpile on that guy, everybody, quick!_

_Glimpses of dull gleaming bone, and gnashing teeth that formed skinless sneers. Always the heavy cold drape of their spirit stifling presence, the fog they carried with them. And the black, the total black that shouldn't exist under the sun and against the backdrop of grassy parks and apartment buildings, the greedy black swirling with the dead white faces and hungry grins. _

_And darting through those glimpses, the shining edge of Zangetsu, slicing smoothly through the white, ripping the black to pieces, splitting the gaping jaws- tiny pieces of moments that caught in his vision even as his attention moved onto the next step, the next swing, the next near miss._

_Something spoke._

_Then one form seemed to stand still among the squirming masses and Ichigo realized he, himself, was still as well. It didn't seem to matter; the grins and dead eyes were still there, flashing past his mind, a skipping record. There was no fear in the images. He wasn't even breathing hard. _

_"Oi" said the still one, which now didn't seem to be a Hollow at all. It prodded him in the shoulder. _

_"Wake up"_

Ichigo woke up with a jerk, shortly followed by a yell of surprise when he noticed the figure looming over his bed. The wash of dim light coming in from the street let him pick up just enough of its stance and shape to recognize it as familiar, and a dull sort of confusion wandered into his still sluggish mind. When he pinpointed the individual connected to that particular familiarity, relief sidled into the mix only to be chased away as irritation rushed in and took over the whole affair.

"Do you have to do that?" he demanded.

"Don't pretend you didn't miss me," the apparition replied.

"Learn to knock." Ichigo thought again. "Even better, don't randomly show up here."

"A Shinigami is never random unless he intends to be."

Ichigo glared at the intruder for a long moment.

"Go away! That doesn't even mean anything!"

The visitor grinned at that, crossed his arms and then put his head on tilt, regarding Ichigo intently. The grin faded a bit.

"You're done in," he said.

"Hrmph." Ichigo leaned back against the wall nonchalantly, and only winced a tiny bit as he did. "Not likely. What do you want, Renji?"

"How many Hollows today?"

Ichigo sighed. Enough that he was dreaming of fighting them like the time he had played a new video game all day long and ended falling asleep to the burned in images of virtual foes. Enough that by the end of the day he was sitting and staring at nothing, hearing their shrieks echo around in his head. But they were just regular weakling Hollows, for the most part.

Sure, they'd seemed to be displaying an unusual amount of cohesion, and they'd been coming in waves instead of the usual smattering of individuals- but he and his friends had managed, and no one had been hurt beyond a minor scratch or two. No big deal. Even if it was three days into the inexplicable surge and strange behavior, with Soul Society preparing for the looming war it was perfectly logical for them not to spare any help... the bastards.

"I thought Soul Society wasn't interested," he said.

"They'll keep an eye out."

"But they won't try to find out what's happening and stop it."

"Idiot. Do you think they can find anything that Urahara-san's group can't?"

"They could pretend to care."

"Some do." The grin had been displaced by a distant look, and Renji pulled out the desk chair to flop into. "You don't know as much as you think."

Ichigo opened his mouth to retort, but Renji anticipated the response and blocked it neatly.

"Kuchiki-taicho sent me. Don't complain." The grin snaked its way back to surface. "With your head like that you don't look like you can handle much more; you shouldn't get too upset. But how'd you do that to your gigai?"

Ichigo glared at him, all too aware of the nasty gash across one brow and temple. It came with free bruising and a minor concussion, plus some bruised ribs as a special bonus.

"Kon tried to help," he grumbled. "And I'm not a gigai, moron."

Renji ignored the insult- he was occupied with glancing around the room in realization that something was missing. Ichigo gestured vaguely at his desk.

There was a small glass on it. It was empty except for what appeared to be a particuarly small round marble. Ichigo had decided the concept of time out wasn't a bad one and had discovered it to be nicely quiet. He'd put the fool back in his toy in the morning, when his head wasn't pounding so hard. And speaking of headaches...

"So how was that so important that you had to show up at this time?" Ichigo saw his guest about to make some obnoxiously smug reply and cut him off. "Rather, if you don't have anything really important to say, could you go away now?" He lay back down with a yawn.

Almost certainly, the answer to the first question was just that it was somehow fun. And luckily for Ichigo, the answer to the second did not, for once, involve any banter about staying over or calling emergency meetings or questioning whether or not that was a polite thing to say to someone who was, after all, offering aid and succor. Instead, Renji was still staring in the general direction of the mod soul in its glass container, not focusing on anything in particular.

"I'll be at Urahara Shop," he murmured, finally, and rose to go.

"Don't wake anyone up on your way out." Ichigo mumbled. He was already in the fog of half-consiousness by the time the shadow faded from his room.

* * *

_Exposition, exposition. Promise there will be plenty of action. You'll be sick of it, in fact, and beg for some good old boring dialogue. _

_Palaver is such a great word, isn't it? Some words just feel like what they mean..._

_wtb more hours in my days._

Please review/criticize/etc!

* * *


End file.
